The Fantasy Role-Playing Game: A New Performing Art [Paperback]

Daniel Mackay (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0786408154 | ISBN-13: 978-0786408153 | Publication Date: March 2001

Many of today's hottest selling games-both non-electronic and electronic-focus on such elements as shooting up as many bad guys as one can (Duke Nuk'em), beating the toughest level (Mortal Kombat), collecting all the cards (Pokémon), and scoring the most points (Tetris). Fantasy role-playing games (Dungeons & Dragons, Rolemaster, GURPs), while they may involve some of those aforementioned elements, rarely focus on them. Instead, playing a fantasy role-playing game is much like acting out a scene from a play, movie or book, only without a predefined script. Players take on such roles as wise wizards, noble knights, roguish sellswords, crafty hobbits, greedy dwarves, and anything else one can imagine and the referee allows. The players don't exactly compete; instead, they interact with each other and with the fantasy setting. The game is played orally with no game board, and although the referee usually has a storyline planned for a game, much of the action is impromptu. Performance is a major part of role-playing, and role-playing games as a performing art is the subject of this book, which attempts to introduce an appreciation for the performance aesthetics of such games. The author provides the framework for a critical model useful in understanding the art-especially in terms of aesthetics-of role-playing games. The book also serves as a contribution to the beginnings of a body of criticism, theory, and aesthetics analysis of a mostly unrecognized and newly developing art form. There are four parts: the cultural structure, the extent to which the game relates to outside cultural elements; the formal structure, or the rules of the game; the social structure, which encompasses the degree and quality of social interaction among players; and the aesthetic structure, concerned with the emergence of role-playing as an art form.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Daniel Mackay holds an M.A. in performance studies from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. He lives in Eugene, Oregon.

Product Details

• Paperback: 215 pages
• Publisher: McFarland & Company (March 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0786408154
• ISBN-13: 978-0786408153
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.9 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,532,506 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A New Art Deserves A New Kind of Art Criticism-& This is It!, December 2, 2001

By 

Robert Damen (Detroit, MI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Fantasy Role-Playing Game: A New Performing Art (Paperback)

This is the first book I have read about role-playing games that both suggests that role-playing games have had some kind of impact outside their own isolated world and, at the same time, cuts deeper into the historical and psychological origins of this peculiar, late-twentieth century phenomenon.

Mackay breaks his book up into four sections. The first examines the history of the role-playing game, particularly in relation to other forms of popular culture: fiction, film, comic books, and computer games. The second section looks at the rules that structure role-playing game. The third section looks at the social relations between players within the performance of the game. The fourth section explores the aesthetics of the rpg and includes a fascinating history of the emergence of fantasy as the key to commercialism that it is today from its humble roots as an object of suspicion in orthodox Christian Medieval Europe.

Mackay does not dumb-down his writing, and I'm sure other role-players, as well as others interested in the history of fantasy, will appreciate this. At times, he gets a bit carried away with his systems of organizing the game and describing it, but that is easily forgiven given the groundbreaking nature of this book. Of critical importance is his treatment of the performance of the role-playing game, and not simply as a game made up of a bunch of rulebooks and a bag of dice. The afterword by Marshall Blonsky is as astute and concise an analysis of fantasy gaming (whatever form it may take) as you'll find anywhere. My only question, why did it take so long for a book like this to hit the shelves?

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good beginning for a body of critical work., June 28, 2006

By 

Robert P. Beveridge "xterminal" (Lakewood, OH) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Fantasy Role-Playing Game: A New Performing Art (Paperback)

Daniel Mackay, The Fantasy Role-Playing Game: A New Performing Art (MacFarland and Company, 2001)

The RPG has long been the redheaded stepchild of the gaming world when it comes to serious critical studies. Those few studies that have emerged, while valuable, haven't really looked at the RPG as an art form. Mackay makes an attempt to start a poetics of the role-playing game (it would be hubris, pure and simple, to think a single book could provide a complete poetics of the RPG, and Mackay does not suffer from hubris), a book that other critical observers will be able to build on in the future. In my opinion, for the most part, he succeeds.

The one thing of which most books of critical theory cannot be accused is readability. Mackay does a fantastic job, in most of this book, of keeping it readable; after all, his target audience is not just critical theorists, but role-players as well. He gets into the jargon late in the book, but hopefully by the time the role-players will already be engrossed enough to keep going. And there's another fortunate side effect of the book-- getting more people reading critical theory for fun. Not nearly enough people do that these days; Mackay actually addresses this fact late in the fifth chapter when he talks about the self-referentiality of modern literature, poetry, art, and critical theory.

It's the fifth chapter where Mackay seems to fall off the plant somewhat, though. It becomes obvious that Mackay is of the socialist school of critical theory, though even this comes into question at one point, when he seems to lump socialism in with capitalism as one of the reasons society's going to hell in a handbasket. I spent most of the rest of the book wondering where Mackay's coming from, but I'm guessing that most of the readers of the book won't be conversant enough with schools of critical theory to wonder about what is, essentially, a niggle.

How important a book this ends up being obviously remains to be seen. In the interim, however, it's good reading about a neglected subject. If you're a role-player, it's worth your time. ***